Online Learning Under a Microscope
December 23, 2020
This post was written by Daniel Baltoi. Daniel is an undergraduate student at Fordham University studying foreign relations and French. Daniel enjoys learning more about the world we share, and looks forward to a career involving cross-cultural collaboration.
It’s no secret that one particularly hard-hit victim of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been the national education system. Traditional schooling, typically involving dozens of students present in a given class and hundreds mingling in the same building each day, has been replaced in many areas with socially-distanced, online formats. Given the fluid nature of the crisis, data on how many of America’s roughly 75 million students are stuck online is scant. But at least in the Alhambra-U.S. Chamber’s hometown of Austin, Texas, the public Austin Independent School District recently committed to offering remote learning throughout the entire current school year, and the University of Texas at Austin remains at an “Ultralow Density” status, with a “large number” of classes conducted remotely. It’s safe to say that online learning on a massive scale will be with us for a while, and therefore as a complement to our previous post on remote learning’s potential upsides, what follows is a brief look at what we already know and will soon find out concerning remote learning’s effectiveness.
Taking up such an inquiry, first and foremost, is difficult! For one thing, online education is unfamiliar to many students, making the collection of useful data a challenge. The National Center For Education Statistics estimates that during the Fall 2018 semester, only 3% of public elementary schools, 13% of public middle schools, and 58% of public high schools offered any online courses at all, and among those that did, a majority in each category only offered “one or a few classes” online. Remote learning is substantially more popular among universities, yet only a third of American undergraduates took online classes during that pre-pandemic semester, and only 14% of students learned exclusively online. Still, those comparatively higher percentages mean that most relevant studies examine online learning at the university level.
One such study, conducted from 2009 to 2011, involved sociology students at the University of Arizona. Four hundred undergraduates graded their own professors at the end of their courses, some of which were online and some in-person. Student ratings of their courses were used since such ratings usually correlate well with actual achievement. The results? On the whole, online classes were rated worse; the students learning online were likelier than their in-person counterparts to report learning less and receiving less respect. Interestingly, though, certain professors – those normally rated poorly in in-person instruction – received better marks for their online teaching. The implication is that a transition to online learning does not have the same effect on every teacher; some may find their talents hindered, but others may thrive in comparison. Despite these findings, the Arizona study’s authors note that their findings ought not to be taken as gospel. While theirs was an improvement over many past studies in that there was a larger than typical sample of students and teachers, limitations linger. The study did not focus on non-sociology majors, only involved one variety of online learning, and most notably, its sample of online students was self-selecting.
In fact, as the authors of another analysis, Cornell professors Bradford Bell and Jessica Federman, note, virtually every remote learning study suffers the same problem. A survey of university students taking online classes is difficult to make truly random, because the students themselves choose whether to learn online or not. Such self-selection raises the possibility that any difference between learning online and in-person is simply down to the circumstances of the students themselves. Another issue with prior studies is the potential variation in instruction. Ideally, in such comparisons, the instruction would remain constant and only the mode of instruction would differ. But often curriculum materials and grading systems vary between online and in-person classes, making comparisons imperfect.
Nonetheless, Bell and Federman take a look at the range of meta-analyses–studies of studies–on the subject, and draw their own meta-conclusion. According to them, studies generally indicate no difference in effectiveness between online and in-person university learning. But in many, quite variable results came up, such as the trend in the Arizona study of normally poor professors finding greater success online. The pair conclude that rather than one mode of learning always guaranteed superiority or inferiority, “characteristics of the instructional design create the conditions in which learning occurs.” Consequently, “research needs to move beyond the ‘does it work’ question towards a better understanding of exactly what does influence the effectiveness of e-learning.”
Today, we find ourselves in a brave new world in which samples of students learning remotely are no longer self-selecting. Regardless of whether online learning is worse, as the Arizona study asserts, or equivalent, as the Cornell writeup suggests, it is something millions of students across the nation have to deal with, from undergraduates to, remarkably, elementary schoolers.
At the beginning of the year, we started with what we already knew. Another recent study, published in 2016 and looking at working adults at a university in the southeastern U.S., found a link between confidence in using the internet and academic success. Sal Khan, the mastermind behind the free online learning platform Khan Academy, provided his own tips in a New York Times op-ed: Drive conversations, provide students resources to practice with, and emphasize human connection. By the end of this year (or, hopefully, the national emergency) we will know much more. How does the average university student, rather than one who chose to learn remotely, fare academically? What about much younger students? Can online learning be effectively combined in a hybrid model with socially-distanced in-person classes? The present school year is and will be unrecognizable, and that alone likely hinders learning as the many students unfamiliar with remote education abruptly transition. But that also means that a multitude of new strategies will develop, as teachers around the country are forced to innovate and rise to the challenge. However effective online learning was in August, next June will be another, much better story.
